Ascent of Fort Mountain on 2010-09-12

Ascent Trip Report

I set up 4 consecutive days' day hike plans in Maine between 9/9-12 2010. Ed.P joined my hiking events.

Day-1 is to hike to Begelow Range in order to cover 3 peaks: The Horns, West Peak and Avery Peak.Day-2 is to hike to Saddleback / Saddleback-the Horns in RangeleyDay-3 is to hike to Mt Kathadin to peakbag Hamlin, Baxter and Pamola Peaks.Day-4 is to hike to N/S Brothers, Coe and Fort.

On 9/12(Sun), Ed and I hiked to North Brother first, then, Fort with bushwhacking, came back to N Bro, then, South Brother and Coe.

It was long drive to get to Marston Trail TH from Baxter State Park entrance gate. I think we drove about an hour or so because speed limit is generally 20mph, near campground is 10mph.

We started to hike at 6:45AM. We arrived at the first Tr. Junction between Martson vs. lowe Coe Tr at 7:30AM (1.3 mi) which is a bit under book time. Since this is 4th day of our hike, Ed was getting exhausted already. We continued hike to get to about Col between North and South Brothers (1.6 mi) and we got there 9AM. Took first break to eat something for 15min.

We left there at 9:15AM and arrived at No Brother summit (0.8 mi) at 10:02. We took a rest for a while. Then, we started bushwhacking to Mt Fort at 11:30AM. I started bushwhacking at the cairns at the summit of N. Bro. Facing to Mt Fort, this cairns is located at a bit left side from the N Brother peak. From there, there are several cairns are seen downward and herd path obviously.When I traced herd path carefully, this bushwhacking isn't really difficult at all to trace. There are overgrown spruce when we descent from N Bro. So I just needed to pay attention to the ground. In addition to this herd path, I see blue tape ribbons 3-4 times while descending which someone tagged in past.

I didn't lose any herd path in order to get to Mt Fort summit. Near Fort summit, I started to see orange or reddish spray sign on many rocks which are another good indicators to follow.

When I got to the summit areas of Mt Fort, I observed 2 peaks which is left and right. Left side, I only see cairns. Right side, I see crashed airplane parts and cairns. I went to both.

We left Fort mountain at 11:53am and came back to North Brother summit at 12:45pm or so.

There are many eroded areas at decent from North Brother. Streams are on top of trails. So we carefully hiked out and spent much time than we originally anticipated. We got back to Col at 1:37PM.

At the col, we met one couple who hiked from Coe and So Bro. They told us they did No Bro and Fort last year but they ran out of time and they had to give up So Bro and Coe. That's why they had to come back. We were smart enough that we know it takes a lot of time to grab 4 mountains and we started our hike very early!

We chatted with this couple about 5-10min and left this col to grab So. Brother. We arrived at So Brother summit at 2:25pm and Mt Coe at 3:43PM. We spent some time to hike out at big slide from Coe. We finally came back to the parking lot at 5:38PM.

In total, it's 11.3 miles hike and it took 10 hours 53min since we took 3 times meal breaks. Each one was 15-20min.